Friday Link Wrap-Up

Friday, July 9th, 2010 at
11:05 am by Doug

They check immigration status at traffic stops. This can only be referring to those racists in … Rhode Island. Do you think we’re likely to see a lawsuit from the Justice Department there? Yea, me neither. In fact, it’s already been upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals when a private citizen sued. Yet the government is going after Arizona for this. Can’t have anything to do with who each state voted for in the last election, right?

“A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman.” I’ve read portions of the ruling, and I can actually see the judge’s point. However, I think the 10th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause is being misused a bit to now refer to things like health benefits, which doesn’t really strike me as “protection” from a government’s viewpoint. And Jack Balkin, a supporter of same-sex marriage incidentally, wonders (among other things) if liberals really want to go down this path with the 10th Amendment. “As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.”

The “biggest revolution in the NHS [Britain’s National Health System] for 60 years” is … giving doctors responsibility for overseeing patient care! Yes folks, it took 60 years of socialized medicine for them to realize that. Do you want to lose those 60 years of common sense here?

Much of the media is saying that the report that was commissioned by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia to investigate the ClimateGate document dump exonerated the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Except there’s the issue of the biggest thing critics have been harping on; the “hide the decline” suggestion that inconvenient data has been reworked to be consistent with the conclusion already drawn. Buried in the report is this gem:

On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a “trick” and to “hide the decline” in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was Misleading.

Terry Miller explains:

The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade—we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe—and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate.

So the big issue that critics latched on to is, indeed, still a big issue.